Gaza's famine warnings will test humanity — and Netanyahu

A famine could be expected to bring the total number of casualties in Gaza to more than 100,000.

Benjamin Netanyahu says he’s come under “inappropriate” pressure from some of Israel’s most loyal friends after America’s Jewish Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for early elections and President Joe Biden accused Bibi of doing more harm than good to his country. Netanyahu is right, of course, that it’s up to Israelis to decide whom they elect and when to do it. Yet at this point, diplomatic protocol seems like a footnote — and the least of the prime minister’s problems should he allow famine to take hold in Gaza.

According to the Integrated Food Security Classification, a two-decade-old organisation whose assessments are used for planning by the United Nations and international aid organisations, as many as 1.1 million residents of Gaza — roughly half the population — are at risk of catastrophic food insecurity by July, and 210,000 in the North are likely to fall into the formal definition of famine between now and May. The IPC also said that the threshold for acute malnutrition among children, one of the criteria required for it to declare a famine, has already been passed.

The Israeli agency in charge of supplying Gaza — Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories — says the IPC information is out of date, because access improved over the last week or two and COGAT is now admitting 80 percent more trucks carrying food into the Strip than before the conflict began. The organisation posted photographs it said were of heaving Gaza market stalls to support its case and said much of the problem lies with the lack of distribution capacity among aid organisations inside Gaza.

Without more independent journalists allowed into Gaza to verify what’s happening, it’s hard to be certain what those claims and pictures mean. This much is certain, though: Even COGAT’s account acknowledges there are problems with getting sufficient critical aid to Northern Gaza, where Israel has so far refused to reopen border crossings. At least one in-person report, by Reuters, has confirmed that there are children with prior conditions weakened by malnutrition in hospital wards in the south.

A number of academic studies have shown that most wars create many more casualties through hunger and disease than bullets and bombs. The average multiple, according to one of the largest such surveys by the Swiss-based Geneva Declaration, was four indirect deaths for every fatality caused directly by combatants, across 13 conflicts examined. The highest multiple, 15.7, was in Sierra Leone in 1999-2002.

Applying this average to the Hamas-run Gaza health authority figures for casualties to date, including the roughly one-third that the Israel Defense Forces say were Hamas fighters, a famine could be expected to bring the total number of casualties in Gaza to more than 100,000. Already, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, an Austrian lawyer named Volker Turk, has said Israel’s “extensive restrictions” on the passage of aid into Gaza “may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which is a war crime.”

The relationship between the UN and Israel is utterly broken. Yet Netanyahu should take these claims seriously, because Gaza is unusual: Unlike many other conflicts, where indirect deaths were attributable to a range of factors outside the immediate control of protagonists, such as crop failure, this crisis would be entirely man-made. And so long as Israel refuses to open access points in the North, allowing trucks to bring aid in without having to cross the entire war zone to reach Gaza City, it’s impossible for even COGAT to argue that Israel is doing all that it can or should.

If we take Israel’s government at its word, the fact that food is not getting where it needs to is due to the chaos and insecurity of war. Some of this, Israel says, is because Hamas is sequestering food for its fighters. Of course it is. But not even COGAT claims that Hamas is destroying food to starve civilians, and if its numbers on the amount of aid entering by truck every day are correct — 3,665 tons, or 8 million pounds, of food on March 17, for example — that’s enough for hundreds of thousands of people. There are only a few tens of thousands of Hamas fighters to feed, at most.

More than 1 million people have taken refuge from war in Rafah, so if Netanyahu orders the Israel Defense Forces into the city to destroy the four Hamas battalions he says are holed up there, the chaos and insecurity already faced by civilians and aid workers in Gaza will increase exponentially. Unless the IDF first mounts a major operation to clear the city of civilians and move them to well-supplied and organised camps away from the fighting, famine will come.

Netanyahu had no choice but to send troops into Gaza after Oct. 7, despite what Hamas apologists may want to believe. How and when to attack Hamas’ strongholds, though, and what steps to take to reduce civilian casualties, were choices for Netanyahu to make. It remains a choice not to open more entry points into the Strip.

Both Egypt and the European Parliament recently called on Israel to open the six land crossings to Gaza that it’s keeping closed, and COGAT ran a six-truck test from the north. Doing so is the only effective way to get enough aid distributed to Gaza’s two-million-plus population, other than a cease-fire. There are other methods to deliver aid, including air drops and deliveries by sea. Yet the first ship brought in just 200 tons of aid — compared to thousands per day by road — and the second 240-ton sea delivery has been delayed by weather. Airdrops can do even less.

It’s up to Netanyahu to prove the IPC’s famine predictions wrong. Israel may not be a member of the International Criminal Court, but if he fails to act and the worst happens, that won’t stop its prosecutors from pursuing a well-deserved case against him.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Views do not represent the stand of this publication. 

Credit: Bloomberg